Shortly Before his Self-imposed Exile from Germany, Albert Einstein Supports an International Language to Promote Peace and Understanding

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“I am willing to join the federation for the introduction of an international auxiliary language to promote understanding, peace, and cooperation among nations.”

Einstein was a lifelong champion of efforts to eliminate of the nationalist divisions that leaders erected between peoples, often to deadly effect. Esperanto, the “international auxiliary language,” was an easy to learn, politically neutral language invented by L.L. Zamenhof, a Polish ophthalmologist, in the 1870s-1880s. His goals, to transcend nationalism and create harmony and peace in the world community, were certainly shared by Einstein — and pilloried as a Jewish conspiracy by Adolf Hitler. Considering the date of the pledge, Einstein was taking an early stand against the Fascist future into which Europe was about to descend.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-Swiss born theoretical physicist internationally recognized as one of the greatest physicists of all time. He enunciated the general theory of Relativity, with law explaining the relationship between the speed of light and its consequence, the equivalence of mass and energy (E=MC2). For his work in theoretical physics—largely for his 1905 paper on photons and photo-electricity—Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics (announced in November 1922, retroactive for 1921). Working on a unified field theory, he then attempted to explain gravitation and electromagnetism within one set of laws. With the expulsion of Jewish scholars from Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, Einstein joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (1933), which became the most celebrated research center in the world. In 1939, he signed a letter written to President Franklin Roosevelt warning him of the possibility of Germany developing a nuclear bomb. He urged the U.S. to begin uranium research, thus beginning the top secret “Manhattan Project.” Later, at Princeton, he tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully. Einstein received U.S. citizenship in 1940.